It is known that those types of web pages that are periodically updated in the world wide web, such as news pages, weather pages, traffic reports, etc., can be updated at different times of the day. For example, a weather report on web page A at a first server may be updated at 3 p.m., while a weather report on web page B at a second server may be updated at 6 p.m. In another example stock quotes may be updated at 10:28 a.m. at one site and at 10:34 a.m. at another site. This implies that at a given time of day certain Hyperlinks are more up to date and, thus, more useful than other Hyperlinks. In like manner the location of, and the bandwidth (e.g., bits/sec) of, the user's connection may also change the relative usefulness of Hyperlinks. It can be thus realized that the relative usefulness of a user's Bookmarks can also vary with the time of day (TOD), user's location (L), and user's link bandwidth (LBW).
A given Hyperlink will include a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) that is a specification of the location of a link (a synonym for Hyperlink). In general, a URL specifies the protocol (http:// for a web page), site name, path and file name to a resource.
Bookmarks are well known to those that access the Internet, as they are provided by web browsers as a shortcut route to user-selected web pages. In general, a user can specify that a certain web page be placed in the Bookmarks file. When this occurs the web browser stores the network address of the web page in association with a descriptive text string. If the user subsequently clicks on a certain Bookmark, the web page associated with the stored network address is automatically accessed.
One problem present in existing web browsers is that Bookmarks and Hyperlinks are static, and thus ignore the effects of time of day, location and link bandwidth. This triad of user information (TOD, L, LBW) can be referred to for the purposes of this invention as a User Information Triad (UUT).
At the web server end of the connection, and in accordance with one known technique, the contents of a web page can be modified in accordance with a manually entered zip code.
It is also known that a user may write a special program to recreate his Bookmarks folder based on time, location, and link bandwidth. However, it is unrealistic in most cases to require users of the WWW to write a program to update their Bookmarks. As such, a need exists for simple, unified and consistent way to program Bookmarks.
Current web browsers allow some reconfiguration to match the user's link bandwidth. This is currently limited to turning off images and using text-based web pages. However, this existing capability is not configurable on a per web page basis, and thus is less useful than it appears.
Other solutions, such as one known as WebExpress.TM., send differential data to the browser. This is useful in some cases, e.g., a form accepting a stock symbol can be cached and only the varying stock symbol need be exchanged.
At present, no direct solutions that are known to the inventor adapt Hyperlinks and Bookmarks based on the user's location. For example, if a user is in California and the local time is 8 p.m., he may wish to download a driver for a graphics card from a web server in New York, where the local time is 11 p.m. and the network loading is presumably lower.
The recent development of the Dynamic Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), while a significant improvement over HTML 3.2, does not address the above issues. Reference in this regard may be had to the following documents: "HTML 3.2 Reference Specification, W3C Recommendations", D. Raggett, Jan. 14, 1997; and "Dynamic HTML: The Next Generation of User Interface Design Using HTML", Microsoft Corporation, February 1997.